8 Ways for Vacation Rental Companies to Use Videos to Increase Bookings

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million! Your customers are looking at a whole bunch of homes and websites before they select the one they want to book. A video can show the space and the layout more effectively than pictures. I am not suggesting you get rid of pictures, they are still needed. Having a video available to watch can be just the nudge to allow the customer to book with confidence.

Videos of Each Rental Home

The rental homes are your product and having a video of each one will surely increase conversion. On-site video increases traffic 200 – 300% according to Marketing Sherpa.

A drone is effective in communicating the area and proximity to nearby attractions; the beach, shopping and community amenities or whatever is near your destination. But, even a drone video can be boring without additional editing and your guests will also want to see inside. You want to highlight what makes each home special and unique.

Keep the videos short; you don’t have to show every room and each bathroom. Videos around 1.5 to 2 minutes seem to keep visitors most engaged. Pay special attention to the music so it has wide appeal and goes with the flow of the video. In fact, you don’t have to use “music” and can instead use the sound of the sea for an ocean front house or the sounds of birds and wildlife for a wooded site. In fact, no sound can communicate “getting away from it all”. Keep in mind music is copyrighted and use royalty free tracks for a smoother customer experience.

Do you have a family that rents the same house every year? Include a testimonial from the family in your video for the home. Reviews and testimonials are super for converting customers.

Here is an example of a property video, Discovery Beach House, with a bit of humor.

Educational Videos to Attract Traffic

Don’t limit your video subjects to just the properties you manage. Consider all the ways you can educate potential guests using video. Better still, these videos are very “sharable”.

What are some of the attractions to your area that guest would be excited to visit and may be the deciding factor on where they plan to visit? Guest sometimes have several destinations in mind when they begin their research. Videos of the activities and attractions provide an opportunity to partner with other local companies to produce the videos and refer traffic to each site. Corolla Classic Vacations created this intro video and featured Ocean Atlantic Rentals, an equipment rental company.

Sea Pines Resort created this video. While the YouTube channel has several videos they created, the company does not use them throughout the site to get maximum benefit.

Consider these video subjects:

Historical Sites

Beaches

Amusement Parks

Shopping Areas

Museums

Outdoor Activities

Fishing / Boating

Lighthouses

Ski Slopes

Attractions

Restaurants

Wildlife

Educational videos do not have to be limited to your rental properties. A video showing your Company’s expertise in property management and the personalities of your staff is a great way to attract new owners to your firm. Elite Destination Homes created this video; while it is a bit long it does show their expertise in vacation rentals.

A fun idea is to have a contest for the best visitor’s video. Creating a composite video of all the ways visitors enjoy your destination will make potential guest want to visit and “star” in their own video. This will allow guest to feel like they have been to your destination before they arrive.

Everyone (almost) loves dogs. How about creating a video about the vacation from the dog(s) point of view?

Videos in blog posts

Don’t hesitate to use your videos in blog posts. Leverage the videos you have already created and create a blog post from it. In fact, once you have an inventory of videos you can create a separate “video blog” to highlight all the video content. Corolla Classic Vacations includes traditional blog and video blogs on a combined blog page.

Website Pages

Want to capture potential guests’ attention when they visit your website? Feature your best video on the home page. Best Texas Travel created a composite video showing their homes (and Teepees) and feature it on their homepage. But, don’t stop there, consider each page on your site and think of how you can communicate the same message with a video.

Company profile

Video can make your company more approachable and knowable. Capturing the employees at your company either doing their job or describing their favorite attraction, restaurant or activity can make potential guest feel more comfortable about renting from your company. While a video won’t make you instant friends it does make you more real. Don’t we all prefer doing business with ones we know?

You can add videos of important people at your company to the “About Us” page or do a composite video of several employees. It can be serious or you can have some fun with it and add some humor to it. Twiddy included this video for an industry update on the Vacation Rental Market.

Videos on Landing Pages & Thank You Pages

Videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 80% according to Eyeviewdigital.com. Include a related video on your landing pages for offers to potential guests. For example, if you have a visitor’s guide that is downloadable, include a video overview of what is in the guide on the landing page where you collect visitor information. A video on the thank you page showing the “next step” will keep visitors on your site.

Gated Videos

Most of the time, we don’t gate the videos. You want your website visitors to engage with your content freely. There are a few categories of video where gating it to collect names and email addresses could be useful for future marketing efforts. For example, gating your video about your property management services would let you know if competitors are watching it and allow you to announce new services to owners or potential owners who have watched the video.

Book the Reservation

Having website visitors’ book vacations is the bottom line. Delivering content to visitors in the form they prefer and making them comfortable about their decision will keep them coming back year after year.

Make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to email them after their vacation to keep your company “top of mind” and remind them about the wonderful time they had.

Using the word video in email subject lines boosts open rates by 19% and click through rates by 65% according to Syndacast. So, next time you are sending emails out, remember to get your video tool box out and include a video in your email.

Analyze the Video Results

If you use YouTube or another platform to host your videos don’t forget to periodically analyze the results; the play rate and engagement level. Continue to promote top performers and learn how to improve the videos that did not meet expectations.

For more information on videos, blogging, other content marketing ideas, or tips on attracting strangers and converting them into leads and then into customers, visit Paveya’s Vacation Rental Marketing blog.

8 Ways for Vacation Rental Companies to Use Videos to Increase Bookings was last modified: February 6th, 2017 by Victoria Jackson